Article and Response

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3429903.stm

This article was about the country Mauritania. Traditionally, they would force-feed girls to make them fatter. Being fat was seen as beautiful, rich, and taken care of. Men wrote poems about how beautiful fat women, as big as ships, were.

The writer of the article went to a "fat farm" in Mauritania where the owner of the farm force feeds seven-year-old girls. She said that they always cry, but she didn't think force-feeding girls was cruel. She thought it was good so that they could get a husband. She also said that she had seen girls that were ten years old give birth.

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It hard to support cultural relativism (the idea that no culture is good or bad, just difefrent) when I read about such unbelievable cruelty to children. Force feeding them and then marrying them off seems unimaginably cruel.